Talking about Revolution

A dear multilingual friend wrote to me

I finally read The Leopard earlier this spring. I can't say it's a favorite, but it's certainly a masterful novel. Di Lampedusa makes keen psychological observations. It did leave me with the question of what was the source of the Prince's deep-seated discontent, and why his daughters never married.

To which I replied:

Ha, you put your finger on the central issue of The Leopard: the sadness of life. Some cultures elevate this to an aesthetic principle. When the French asked Chopin what it was in his music that they found so strangely and otherworldly moving, which they felt but couldn't name, he said (this is a real quote): "oh, that is a uniquely Polish feeling, we have a word for it, żal, there is no word for it in French." (Chopin grew up perfectly bilingual, so he would know about the absence of "żal" in French).

But he was wrong about this: certain other cultures do celebrate this feeling, too, not just Poles. The Japanese. The Turks. (Is it accidental that the nations that do are former great powers who have fallen?) It is a kind of sadness for something beautiful that passed away unfulfilled. It isn't "regret" (which is mainly for things that went wrong, or you wish hadn't happened). Rather, it describes a situation when you meet a gorgeous person in passing but life prevents anything from happening and years later you think about it, wishing it had happened.

And this is Fabrizio's position: his life is coming to a close and he reflects on all the things that could have been and weren't and never will come again. He is aging and now that he is old, beautiful women only pretend they find him attractive. They say this because he is cute, and they like him, but, truth be told, they would not bed him now. Likewise, his class is coming to an end and will become politically irrelevant and all the culture it has created will die and will be replaced by Andy Warhols and Banksys.

The novel is personal but also sociological and political. It describes events that usher in a dramatic change in Sicily, The world turning topsy-turvy. For generations, Don Fabrizio and his kind dominated the state. This was unjust and unfair to 90% of the population, but (a lame excuse, I know) it created all the classical art and architecture and poetry and music which we, the grunt successors cannot reproduce (for lack of time and resources), but can enjoy. And while he has obviously thought his class was stupid (he looks at them during the ball and calls them "monkeys", he recalls his King being a profound mediocrity) he loved the beauty of that life.

He recognizes that things must change. (Tancredi's remark that "for things to stay the same, everything must change" is way over-hyped in critical literature: for one thing, it is wrong; things did not stay the same; new men came to power; the culture has changed as a result; things are different now. Not the first time I am brought to think that literary critics are stupid). Don Fabrizio recognizes this, and is sad about it, but he accepts it because he knows that for most human beings in Sicily (and the world) the new order will be an improvement. So he does nothing to oppose it. He just reserves for himself the right to feel sad about it and not to be part of the revolution. His inactivity is the tithe of loyalty he pays to the old system.

As to your specific question about why his daughters never married, the answer should be blindingly obvious: stemming as they do from the ancient aristocracy, they refuse to marry beneath their rank; the problem is that men who "rank" with them (in birth, manners, culture) have become poor and irrelevant; and the relevant men are beneath them because they are a) low born b) uneducated c) uncultured. You see, Bunny, men marry down, women marry up. There was no "up" these girls could marry. So they didn't.

But now that you have read The Leopard, may I insist you should listen to the audiobook of Steven Price's "Lampedusa?" I never thought anyone could beat Lampedusa (or Death in Venice). But Steven Price did. Listen:

"Mirella Radice was slender, with small shoulders, and a long soft neck with a fuzz of brown hair at the nape. He had found her quiet and submissive when Giò had first brought her to meet them two years ago but soon he had come to recognize the quick arched eyebrow, the slight lift of her lip when Giò spoke outrageously, and he had liked both the discretion and the dryness of her company. She had a habit of taking in a room as if from the side of her vision, and of turning her face slightly as one spoke so she might seem to be listening more intently. Her voice was low, her laugh deep and rich as a laugh heard from underwater. When she smiled, he felt old but did not mind it, for there was such purity of emotion in her. He could not recall a time when his own pleasure had been untainted by loss, by sadness. Mirella was educated, but uncultured, and it was this he and Licy had set to correct in her. No life can be lived deeply, Licy told her upon their first meeting, if it is lived outside of art."

Like a laugh from underwater? This book is more gorgeous and more touching than the original. The audiobook version is also read absolutely gorgeously. (I listen to audiobooks while I fall asleep). May I send you a link to listen to it for free?

As they went out to face their Great Adventure

Teodor Parnicki, Koniec Zgody Narodów

As they went out to face their Great Adventure, it seemed to them at first -- to Heliodoros and Dioneia -- no more than another ordinary business trip down the Great River, which they called the Oxos, and which the men who were to come many, many centuries later would call the Amu Daria.

That river was to the Greek kingdom in the heart of Asia like the Nile was to Egypt – with the significant difference being that to them – to Heliodoros and Dioneia – “traveling down the river” could never have meant traveling to its estuary; because more or less in that spot where the middle course of the Oxos became its lower course, the kingdom of the Greek Euthydemid family ended and another one began: the so-called Scythia, by which name the Greeks were inclined (and the more so the further they found themselves from the Oxos) to call all those vast spaces, mainly steppe, inhabited by numerous races, half-settled and half-nomad, and linguistically akin to the people of Iran which the Greeks then ruled.

Of those Scythian tribes, perhaps a dozen, or a dozen and a half, were united into super-tribal unions, and one of those unions, which called themselves the Massagetai, equipped itself with a significant navy and prevented any and all Greek ships from reaching the mouth of the Oxos.

Worse yet: this Massagetai navy staged, from time to time, piratical raids on those territories deemed to be “no man's land” and – what was worse, from time to time – those clearly remaining under Greek suzerainty and protection. And at such times, the broad waters of the Oxos became the site and witness of great battles, one of which (clearly the most important) was eventually commemorated by the stamping of a coin; a coin which was to survive ages upon ages upon ages; and which was destined to play a critical role in the Great Adventure of Heliodoros and Dioneia.

In the course of that battle, a Greek ship called “Meandria” played an especially prominent role. Some years later, it was renamed (on the orders of Great King Demetrios, son of Euthydemos) as “Harmony of All Nations in the Heart of Asia”. And, under this new name, it was destined to become (all those many years later) the main home of Heliodoros and Dioneia.

One should therefore not be surprised that it was their fate to face their Great Adventure on its deck. Indeed, it would have been strange if they had had to face their Great Adventure anywhere else since they felt at home on her deck more than anywhere else. And, after all, the true nature of any Great Adventure is that, in its course, a person is subjected to a test such as he is, and not as he seems to himself or to others.

Teodor Parnicki's historical novels often address issues of identity -- both personal and ethnic; as you would expect from a son of German citizens interned in Russia during World War I, who learned to speak Polish as a teenager, in Polish high school in Harbin, Manchuria. During World War II, already an established author, he found himself in Soviet Central Asia and the fruit of that sojourn was this book about Hellenistic Kingdoms in Bactria and India: a deeply subversive take on what it meant to be Greek in Central Asia and what it means to belong to a nation or to have a national identity.

This is a beautifully written thinking person's novel, with a political mystery at its center; and takes place on a mysteriously powerful Greek ship on the River Oxus ("The Harmony of Nations" of the title) in days immediately leading to a revolutionary change in ethnic policy about to be sprung on his Greek subjects by Demetrios, their king, from his distant war camp in North India.

Why are Japanese male writers such ridiculous oddballs?

When I need to take a break from doing what I love, which is translating Polish classics (books I grew up loving and keep re-reading), I relax by... translating short stories by Japanese masters.

Like Osamu Dazai, herein featured by reference.

Osamu Dazai was a sensitive and intelligent man. You can see it from his photos: his face is easy to read.

He was also born to be a misfit. He was the eighth child of a plebeian and very rich landowning family in the far north of Japan. See how that puts him out:

1) he's from Northern Japan (everybody knows they are bears and wolves, not people, up there in their Tohoku; come autumn they kill a moose and sew themselves up in the carcass until spring to survive the deep freeze, and drink some really rancid booze to prevent their blood from freezing solid); all his life Dazai exaggerated his northern dialect to rile the finer sort and hung around with rude Northerners like himself;

2) he's elite but not elite (first, he's Tohoku elite, what kind of elite is that?); second, they're not even elite (a.k.a. former samurai); they are just peasants made good; new money, OK?

3) he's the eighth child anyway, who cares about the eighth child?

Then there is that literature thing.

I mean, in every country in the world and in every family, the parents tremble to hear that junior intends to be a writer (or, God forbid, even worse, a poet). How will you make a living, son?

But in Japan, this comes with a heavy moral tinge.

It's all very well for a girl to write fiction. Murasaki Shikibu, Lady Nijo, Sei Shonagon, fine traditions, blah, blah. Who cares? All women ever have to do is something inconsequential like bear and raise kids, and maybe serve their husband his sake during the evening meal. So who can possibly object if a woman scribbles something in her free time, of which she has plenty, especially if she scribbles it in that funny women's script, hiragana.

But MEN don't WRITE. (For Hachiman's sake!)

MEN DO.

Men either run a business; or slave away 47/9 (47 hours a day, 9 days a week) as sarariman; or they don armor and go out and do unto their neighbors.

To do vapid dung like write literature is both weak-bum sissy AND unbelievably rude (as in "selfishly ignoring the polite rules of society").

So, if you are born with all that baggage (eighth child of new money peasants from the far North) and then you turn on your own family by choosing to become a writer, this is not just disobedience, it is disobedience cubed.

Add to that that your family probably DOES drink antifreeze and has not read a book since high school required reading.

And now you make this decision -- to become a sissy writer -- in the days of the military regime when THE WHOLE NATION SACRIFICES FOR THEIR SACRED EMPEROR, this emperor about whom you don't give a rolling donut. Well, you're not just beyond the pale, you're just DEAD MEAT. However well you write.

And this makes you a rebel, yes?

And if for all the social pressures, you rebel anyway, then... where lie the boundaries of rebellion? Is it ok to drink? Take drugs? Sleep around? Walk out on your wife? Make a double suicide pact with a beautician half your age?